Hello, and why on earth is this site called scizu?

Hey there. I'm just a guy who's been building small websites as a hobby for a while now. It started the way a lot of things do - just messing around and trying to figure out how stuff worked. Some of my earliest "sites" were just IP addresses with no domain name, which tells you everything you need to know about how seriously I was taking the whole thing. More learning exercise than actual website.

The first real one I remember putting together was back in college, a site with a collection of recipes for cocktails and a running list of parties I was hosting or planning to attend. Exactly the kind of thing a college guy would build, and honestly the first useful site I ever made. My friends used it, it was fun, and I was hooked on the idea of building something small that served a group of people that I cared about.

I've run a few other small sites since then, and this is the first time people asked about putting up a blog.

The first question people ask is: What's with the name? A few have even told me it sounds like some kind of Chinese knockoff of Amazon. Funny because I'm about as average of a white American guy as you're likely to find.

The truth is less interesting. I wanted something short — genuinely short, not "short for a 14-syllable brand name" short — and that is surprisingly hard to find with domain names in 2023. Everything is taken. I also didn't want something that looked like a cat walked across the keyboard, like qlqwf.com. I wanted it to be pronounceable and easy to remember after hearing it once. And ideally, it shouldn't accidentally mean something embarrassing in another language (look up the Chevy Nova).

Scizu checks all of those boxes. It's short, it's not gibberish, you can say it out loud without feeling ridiculous, and it appears to mean absolutely nothing in any language. Done. No focus groups, no brand consultants, no pivot strategy.

That last part kind of sums up the whole philosophy here. I'm not interested in marketing or building a brand. I'm not going to pepper the pages with ads or nudge you toward spending money on things. The goal is the same as it's always been — a small site with a small community, doing the specific things we actually want it to do, without all the marketing machinery that most of the internet has bolted onto everything.

If that sounds appealing to you, stick around. There's more to come.